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Thursday, 18 June 2009

Further to a previous post regards Warlord Games English Civil War plastic Royalist infantry here a quick update. The box set contains a nicely presented information leaflet complete with a potted history of several interesting regiments. Regarding the miniatures themselves the pike men, due to their stance, have mould lines straight down the middle of their faces. A few had flash around the feet but this is no problem to remove.

Command group figures - nice and flamboyant but I'm not to sure about the arm fittings.

One of the pike man figures has to be used as a member of the command group as there are only three figures on the special sprue.

Unfortunate mould lines (unprepared figure on right)

Command group and twelve pike men based ready to be primed.Figures wearing Morion helmets will be used mainly on the front line and will be used for the other groups I have to build for my brother. The pikes will be fixed after painting the bodies.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I went to see the John Woo’s film ‘Red Cliff’ last night. From what I’ve read the film is relatively accurate portrayal being based on the ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ and particularly the Battle of Red Cliff.

As you’d expect from the director of Hard Boiled Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2, the battle scenes are spectacular and there aren’t the flying special effects you normally associate with Chinese/Hong Kong films.

The film looks like a combination of the Lord of the Rings, Gladiator and Seven Samurai films and the old TV series The Water Margin and Monkey. Not a bad thing of course as I enjoyed all of them.

There are scenes were the main characters use wargame miniatures in preparation for a naval battle. After leaving the cinema I was sorely tempted to buy Perry Koreans and Samurai figures but I will resist (if only for the sake of my bank balance).

I won’t be blogging for a while (on this page at least) as I’m off to Arras next week to tour around the WWI battlefields. Arras is now largely forgotten but it actually had a higher daily death rate (4076 deaths per day over 39 days) than the 1916 battle of the Somme (2943 deaths over 141 days) although the campaign was shorter. The Vimy memorial is just north of the town.The town is the capital of the Pas-de-Calais department but is often overlooked (just like the battle really). I’ve spent a day in the town before but this time we’re based there. Hopefully should be an interesting trip.